It seems to me tremendously unfair to Malaysia that events at the Olympic Games are restricted to activities that can be considered ‘athletic’.

And even more unfair that ‘athletic’ is apparently defined in such a way as to exclude so many activities in which Malaysia is famously world-class.

Like, most obviously, the national sports of shopping and eating, in both of which a great many Malaysians train so hard and successfully that the country could justly be called Mallaysia or Mealaysia.

And as accomplished as so many of the nation’s citizens are in these fields, apparently none have achieved such supreme international championship levels as Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak and his mixed-doubles partner Rosmah Mansour.

Their global shopping – and, to judge from Rosmah’s far-from-athletic figure – eating sprees are so legendary that as far as I’m concerned they deserve to be referred to as Malaysian Olympians 1 and 2, or MO1 and MO2 for short.

Because surely they would be shoo-ins for gold medals if the Olympic Games organisers weren’t so unfairly narrow-minded.

As would MO1 and Umno, the political party he heads, if the International Olympic Committee had the sense to include the ever-popular sport of synchronised spinning.

In fact, so superior has the Umno team and its media minions been in synchronized and every other form of spinning that it has outstripped all other regimes in the world for endurance, having run Malaysia for a marathon 59 years.

And looks set to lead the pack for many more Olympiads to come, having long perfected not just its spinning but also the hurdles.

Not so much leaping hurdles itself, however, but by a gold-medal performance in the sport of placing higher and higher hurdles in the path of those perennial also-rans, the Malaysian people.

Hurdles ranging from political control of the police, judiciary, ‘religious’ authorities and all the so-called civil services to a blatantly rigged and bribery-riddled electoral system.

Hurdles so insurmountable, in fact, that even though the whole world knows that Najib or MO1, together with his entire cabinet and crowd of cronies and supporters, should be headed for the high-jump for their complicity in the 1Malaysia Development Corporation (1MDB) swindle, the Malaysian people have no way of achieving this happy result.

And even more depressing is that millions of Malaysians either condone or don’t care about such Olympian levels of fraud and corruption, as they’ve been comprehensively doped.

Doped not with performance-enhancers like countless Russian and doubtless other Olympic athletes, but dumbed, numbed and performance-diminished by decades of false political, religious and racial propaganda by Umno’s aforementioned synchronised spinners.

But of course the Malaysian regime is by no means alone or even a leader in the race to turn its turn its people into a rabble of dopes and drones.

The gold medal would surely go to the laughably mis-named ‘People’s’ Republic of China if this event was to be included in the Olympics, with Putin’s Russian Republic a pretty sure bet for a silver, with Malaysia and countless other suspects competing for the bronze.

And of course the US is also shaping as a hot contender for a medal, what with millions of its inhabitants apparently dumb enough to accept, or at least to pretend for their own purposes to accept, the dope that Donald Trump doses them with.

Like, for example, his latest declaration that Barrack Obama and Hilary Clinton started Islamic State. A statement that clearly deserves a gold medal for sheer gall, let alone grotesque falsehood.

But on second thoughts, and in all fairness to Malaysia, it is not a great deal more ridiculous than many claims made by MO1. Like his denials that he was involved in the Scorpene submarines scandal and the associated murder of Altantuya Shaariibuu, for example, or that he met Anwar Ibrahim’s alleged ‘victim’ before Anwar’s second sodomy trial.

Or, indeed, his more recent declaration that the billions of ringgit that appeared in his bank account(s) had nothing to do with the 1MDB scam, but was a ‘donation’ from a Middle-Eastern benefactor.

In short, or in summary, I hope I have made it clear by now why I’m such a strong critic of the Olympic Games in the form in which this event is currently being staged in Rio.

Not just, as many others are, because it is obscene to splurge so much money on sports, especially in countries like Brazil where so many people are so poor and deprived.

And not just because, as in Australia and elsewhere, the local media coverage reduces the Olympics from the celebration of sport that it should be, to a pathetic show of hype, hubris and hysterical nationalism.

But because the way it so patently and unfairly tilts the playing-field against such nations as Umno’s Malaysia, which may not be so great at running, jumping, swimming, sailing, cycling and goodness-knows-what-elsing, sportswise, but are world-beaters when it comes to official lying, cheating and stealing, and thus richly deserve their own Umnolympics.